Tis the season for summer stock: Theater and dance beckon in the Berkshires

By Iris Fanger/For The Patriot Ledger

Tuesday

Jul 3, 2018 at 7:11 PM

The Berkshire Hills are alive with new music, movement and dramas this summer, studding the festival schedules with world premieres. From Williamstown to Pittsfield to Lenox to Lee, musicals, plays, and dance performances will fill the stages to introduce works by the most innovative contemporary creators.

Julianne Boyd, in her 24th year as artistic director of Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield has shepherded many past premieres on their way to New York. Although she “loves doing musicals,” she said is also determined to produce “more new plays.” The season’s opener is a world premiere musical, “The Royal Family of Broadway,” running through July 7, by William Finn (score and lyrics) and Rachel Sheinkin (book), who produced the hit show, “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” one of a long list of works incubated at Barrington Stage. Finn is a Barrington Stage Company Associate Artist and heads its Musical Theatre Lab.

”The Royal Family of Broadway,” a spoof of the Barrymore family of famed and eccentric actors, is based on the 1927 play by George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber. Although director John Rando and his star-studded cast had little more than three weeks to mount the show, “it is well on the way to Broadway,” Boyd said. Opening soon at Barrington Stage are two world premiere dramas, “The Chinese Lady” by Lloyd Suh (July 19-Aug. 11) and “Well-Intentioned White People” by Rachel Lynett (Aug. 16-Sept. 8).

“I like to help the writers, in whatever stage the play is in,” Boyd said.

Further up Route 7 is the Williamstown Summer Festival, celebrating more than six decades at Williams College. Well-known for showcasing stars, the festival is also dedicated to producing new works. The season opened with two world premieres: “The Closet” by Douglas Carter Beane (inspired by “Le Placard, a French play by Francis Verber), running until July 14 and “The Sound Inside” by Adam Rapp, directed by Tony award-winner David Cromer through July 8. The Williamstown Festival and Barrington Stage have two theaters apiece that house the productions.

“The Closet” tells the story of a luckless business executive who declares that he is gay to prevent being fired. Matthew Broderick, whose specialty is playing nerdy men somehow managing to survive, heads a cast that includes Brooks Ashmanskas as a maniacal gay man putting ideas in his head. With snappy one-liners and double takes timed to perfection, the play is not only funny, but is also an astute skewering of politically correct attitudes. Later in the summer, the festival will mount a new musical, “Lempicka” with book and lyrics by Carson Kreitzer, music by Matt Gould, (July 19-August 1), about the aristocratic artist who became a painter in Paris. The comedy, “Artney Jackson” by James Antony Tyler (July 11-22) is also a world premiere.

Dance fans heading to Jacob’s Pillow, designated as a national historic landmark, will have many new companies to discover. Pamela Tatge, in her second season as director of the venerable dance festival, has mentioned three special attractions: the Belgian-based, Eastman, presenting an all-male cast in “Fractus V” (July 11-15), choreographed by artistic director, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui who will also perform; Israeli choreographer, Sharon Fridman’s Compania from Madrid (July 25-29), presenting a program of their signature “athletic, adventurous works, rooted in contact improvisation”; and American choreographer, Netta Yerushalmy, premiering “Paramodernities,” a “deconstruction of works by iconic American dance makers including George Balanchine, Alvin Ailey and Martha Graham,” accompanied by movement and commentary by dance scholar and Duke University professor, Thomas DeFrantz.

One more do-not-miss event combines the resources of Jacob’s Pillow with Williams College Museum, which hosts “Dance We Must,” an exhibit of costumes, artifacts, and photographs stored in Denishawn trunks left unopened for 50 years. Denishawn, directed by Ruth St. Denis and her husband, Ted Shawn, founder of Jacob’s Pillow, was the first American dance company to tour Asia in the 1920s.

A book of William Shakespeare’s plays held up by an actor in “The Royal Family of Broadway” might suggest the short distances between all these theaters and the connection between then and now. Although they were world premieres four centuries ago, a season’s worth of the Bard’s plays will be presented by Shakespeare & Company in Lenox on its indoor and outdoor stages, along with August Strindberg’s “ Creditors” (July 19-Aug. 12) and the more modern “Mothers and Sons” by Terrence McNally (Aug. 16-Sept. 9) . “Macbeth” (July3-Aug. 5), directed by Melia Bensussen, chair of the Department of Performing Arts at Emerson College, features Jonathan Croy and Tod Randolph as the couple with murder on their minds.